Giallo: Italian Pulp Novel Font

Giallo is an unusual font based on the title lettering used on Italian pulp mystery novels since the 1950s – called “Giallo” because of their characteristically yellow covers. Somewhere along the line someone in the Italian publishing industry had the bizarre idea of doing titles with dry transfer lettering and then making them into outlines using white-out. The peculiar result of this is the lettering style which has been used on the covers of Italian pulp novels ever since.

As far as we know our Giallo font is the only attempt to recreate this look digitally – and frankly why the hell would anyone else want to do it? But a customer asked us and we were kind of taken with the oddness of the idea. Giallo includes a full upper case character set, plus numbers and punctuation. The lower case has variant versions of the upper case characters.